Ok, so now you are all set. You have created a blog and leaning back at the chair just thinking what to write about! Aaah!!! This is the biggest thing that happens with each one of us and that’s why many people refrain from writing. This, in blogosphere, is known as ‘the writer’s block’. Overcoming writer’s block is not difficult. You don’t just have to think. Spare some time from your busy schedule and start writing. Start jotting down whatever comes to your mind. You read an article in newspaper today and want to convey your thoughts on it… write it down!

Hey! It started raining outside all of a sudden. What a pleasant weather! Birds chirping, sun shining, people going to work… Just write down what you feel at the moment. You will love it whenever you read your blog the next time. Tell your friends and family about it. They will be happy to read your nice random thoughts.

For a beginner, topic is not important. Once you learn the art of writing, you can write on any topic of your choice. May be later you can write a book by writing a few words in morning and other few in evening!

Do’s and Don’ts of Blogging

There are a few things that you should remember while writing a blog:

• Don’t publish any personal or private information. It may harm you.
• If you want to publish something against someone, do at your own risk.
• Be very polite and use an impressive language.
• Arouse the interest of readers with your words.
• Choose the subject you have a passion for. It should reflect your knowledge about the subject.
• Make blogging your hobby.
• Put some of your valuable time in writing the post and have patience.
• If you are not one of the lucky god-gifted writers, don’t worry, you will learn from practice.
• Do not violate someone’s copyright.
• If you want to quote something you find interesting, do always mention the source.
• Read other’s blogs to get ideas.

See, it was that easy! Share your experiences with me about your first blog. Happy blogging!

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Chris gave a presentation explaining 10 points on writing blog post for corporate blogs. Points covered by him were as follows:

1. Blocking and Tackling – Gather data from various sources about the hot topics and trends of searching.
2. Focus blogging and search – Know what people are doing online. According to a survey, 85% of search clicks happen in organic results. Search is the only metric you can manage. So, isn’t online marketing obvious? More and more people are searching online and therefore, to reach them, you must increase your marketing efforts.
3. Social Media – Rethink everything you hear about social media. It doesn’t mean that you should not get indulged in it, but it means you should prioritize the social sites according to the probability where people might be searching for you. Very rightly said by him, “Don’t spam social media. It’s not a place where you can yell at people anything you want”. (I agree with you, Chris. This is one of the most misunderstood points these days by SEO professionals.)
4. Content and Volume – Content is the most influential factor. Content drives awareness, not advertising. More number of posts drives success.
5. Keyword awareness – You must be aware of what your blog is all about. Keywords guide you. Although there are many keyword tools, but Google AdWords is the best keyword tool these days. Select those keywords which are searched for maximum number of times.
6. Dumb it down – K.I.S.S rule… Keep It Simple, Stupid! Keep your post simple, quick and easy to understand. Think how people are consuming your content.
7. Widespread employee blogging – Blog about customers’ problems and not your products or services. Ask your employees, who would want to blog in your company? More participants give more variety.
8. Great Local – 50% search has local intent. Reach your local customers first. Mentioning streets, cities, zip codes, townships, counties etc. help in increasing local presence.
9. Coupons – Blogging for coupons. Offer your customers coupons to buy your services.
10. Measurement and metrics – Measure the impact of blogging. Measure the keywords that drive traffic. Measure over time and quantity. Less posts, less traffic. When posts increase, traffic will also increase.

Conclusion:
‘Get out of SEO weeds’. Only optimizing your site doesn’t guarantee you top rankings. Write good content and get people’s attention. This is the ‘success mantra’.

Followed by the presentation, he answered a few questions asked by various bloggers. But due to an emergency, he evacuated the place and the session was taken over by Megan Glover, Director of Marketing.

A very good question answered by her was:

Q: How transparent content should be?
A: The content should be such that personality comes out. Try to engage your visitors in a conversation. Rest, it depends on business too that how much information they can reveal.

Unlike the Google webinar, this webinar didn’t offered any way to interact with other fellow bloggers but overall it was a nice experience.

So, are you gonna start corporate blogging? Lemme know if you want to.

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Although the importance of Google PageRank is reducing, yet many webmasters aim to achieve a high PageRank. It is updated after every 3-4 months and thus; don’t reflect the present position of a website. Remember, the actual ranking of a website changes daily, PR updation is just toolbar page rank update.

This time’s PR update is a New Year gift for me and many other bloggers and website owners whose sites jumped up to a higher PR levels. I got surprised to see that AskPreeti.com received PR1 this time and one of my client’s site received a PR4 directly from No PageRank. So, for me it’s a good beginning of New Year. Hope, for you too, it will be great. The fluctuations can be seen till 1st week of January.

How did your sites faired? Please post your experience about this time’s PR updation.

Wishing you a very Happy New Year 2009.

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There are lots of services available for blogging but WordPress, by Automattic, has evolved as the most liked and friendly CMS. At WordCamp conference held in 2008, Founder Matt Mullenweg announced impressive growth figures of WordPress. He reaffirmed that 2009 will be a bug free year for WordPress. Mullenweg’s yearly keynote, was “Strong,” and growth from both WordPress.com and WordPress.org (their hosted and self-hosted platforms, respectively) show it all. TechCrunch had indicated all the stats of WordPress over the last year. The growth of wordpress is sky rocketing. This is quite apparent from google trends’ graph too:

These stats show that WordPress is outgoing its main competitor TypePad, which in contrast to WordPress is a paid blogging platform.

WordPress offers lots of functionality which makes it to stand out of the other blogging platforms. There are lots of plugins and themes available and a good support from WordPress team itself as well as other programmers who create fabulous plugins. The focus for 2009 for the team at WordPress is to provide facility for easier upgrades and more security. And last but not the least, the most exciting of all is the much anticipated BuddyPress, a social networking platform.

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SocialTwist allows you to send your favorite post to your friends without moving away from the site. It provides ‘Tell-A-Friend’ script which can be used across various services like email, social networking/bookmarking sites, IM and other CMS/ blogs. Also, you don’t have to remember the email addresses as the widget shows your contact list from the respective email or social network.

It can be used with various CMS and blogging platforms including wordpress, blogger, drupal, joomla, TypePad and lots more.

Site owners can customize the widget and check usage statics for FREE by signing up at http://secure.socialtwist.com/web/signup.

The best thing is that you can use it on your website too. So just like blogs, your site too can benefit the social networking. Moreover, you don’t need to be a tech guy to use it.

Features:

• Customize the widget UI, content, behavior
• See usage statistics
• Privacy assured – no storing of username or password
• Rich text messages
• Automatically picks appropriate content to announce from the page
• Small footprint, loads fast
• Attractive button and easy to use widget UI
• Users can reach out to friends across social networks
• Simpler and faster means to spread the word
• Wide range of buttons and widget themes
• No need to copy-paste widget for every change of widget configuration

Nothing is better than viral marketing or word of mouth recommendation. Just try it out by yourself now.

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